When it comes to dealing with storage, Solaris 10 provides admins with more choices than any other operating system. Right out of the box, it offers two filesystems, two volume managers, an iscsi target and initiator, and, naturally, an NFS server. Add a couple of Sun packages and you have volume replication, a cluster filesystem, and a hierarchical storage manager. Trust your data to the still-in-development features found in OpenSolaris, and you can have a fibre channel target and an in-kernel CIFS server, among other things. True, some of these features can be found in any enterprise-ready UNIX OS. But Solaris 10 integrates all of them into one well-tested package. Editor's note: This is the first of our published submissions for the 2008 Article Contest.

Will we see more background articles on OSnews in the future ? These would be welcome. And it would be even better if such articles would be written by people with real-life experience. Although the article about Solaris filesystems is well written, some important facts are missing. A few examples:
* There is an important difference between ZFS in Solaris and ZFS in OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris has all the latest and greatest ZFS features, Solaris not yet.
* Sun does support Solaris, but does not offer support for the OpenSolaris builds. My opinion is that with regard to the risk of hitting bugs that the OpenSolaris developer edition builds can be compared to Linux kernel release candidates.
* If there are four filesystems to choose from, this means not every filesystem is suited for every workload. The article does not mention e.g. that when using a single disk, UFS performs better for database workloads than ZFS. This is not a coincidence but is due to the fundamental characteristics of these filesystems (see also Margo Seltzer e.a., File System Logging Versus Clustering: A Performance Comparison, USENIX 1995, http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/usenix.195).